Good Thursday morning. Happy budget day. A “tough choices … honest” budget overview goes to the Hill today, with deets in April, the traditional budget format for the first year of an administration. A little bird says the $3.7 trillion, 134-page budget is bound in Obama blue — “A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America’s Promise.” Figures out this morning from the hardworking elves at the Office of Management and Budget: This year’s deficit is now projected at $1.75 trillion. And the budget has what the White House is calling “a placeholder” of $250 billion for more bank-rescue money.

TOMORROW'S FRONT PAGE TODAY: The loudest yelps about the budget are likely to come from rich people (tax increases), agribusiness (Obama has said farm subsidies are being cut — check page 124) and drug makers (worried about lost profits under health reform). That’s a fight the administration welcomes. The budget — on both the plus and minus sides — reflects how the president sold himself during the campaign, and what he promised.

TOP STORY – POLITICO’s David Rogers, “Tax hike will fund health plan”: “President Barack Obama’s first budget is very much a reflection of him: squeezing the wealthy to help get $2 trillion in 10-year savings, pumping up domestic appropriations faster than defense, and promising a $634 billion down payment toward health care reform. … By itself, the $634 billion won’t be enough to finance the president’s ambitious health plans. But it represents a major commitment upfront, with the administration promised to work with lawmakers to find additional savings as legislation is developed this year.

“Obama's focus on high-end households is consistent with his larger philosophy — both in taxes and spending. Within the $2 trillion in savings, for example, the budget is expected to limit agriculture subsidies to farms earning more than $500,000, resulting in an estimated saving near $16 billion. Large charitable deductions — used to shelter income —ould face new limits, and Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy would expire after 2010.”

OBAMA'S 8 HEALTH CARE PRINCIPLES — POLITICO's Jonathan Martin, Carrie Budoff Brown and Chris Frates: "Administration officials said Obama will adhere to eight principles to guide his health reform effort, including allowing patients to maintain their choice of insurers and doctors. The officials, speaking on a conference call Wednesday to health care insiders, described Obama’s plan as a 'down payment' on covering all Americans. In fact, the Obama team is coining a new phrase — that he’ll 'aim for universality,' without offering specifics of how he would reach that goal, or when. He wants Congress to fill in the details. 'The goal is still to bring down the cost of care and to get universal coverage,' said an administration source. In the conference call, White House health care officials repeatedly stressed how critical the budget was to the larger health care reform effort."

QUOTE DU JOUR — Peter Morici, an economist at the University of Maryland in College Park, to Bloomberg News: “It's a clear repudiation of Bush's policy. … It's more Obama Robin Hood.”

HOW REPUBLICANS WILL PUSH BACK — House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio): "Everyone agrees that all Americans deserve access to affordable health care, but is increasing taxes during an economic recession, especially on small businesses, the right way to accomplish that goal? Given the size of our $1.2 trillion deficit, a proposal costing up to $1 trillion must raise troubling questions.”

MORE BELOW IN “BUDGET SPEED READ.”

TALKERS: ABC News Senior Congressional Correspondent Jonathan Karl sits down with former first lady Laura Bush in Houston today for her first interview since leaving the White House. They’ll talk at the Museum of Fine Arts, where Mrs. Bush is attending the opening of an exhibit from Afghanistan, her first post-inauguration appearance. Jon, who traveled to Afghanistan with her, saw her last night and found her looking relaxed but nowhere near ready for retirement. Excerpts tonight on “World News,” with an extended portion tomorrow on “Good Morning America.”

— N.Y. Times’ Brian Stelter: “More than 52 million people watched President Obama’s first address to a joint session of Congress in prime time on Tuesday, according to Nielsen Media Research…. Mr. Obama’s first prime-time news conference on Feb. 9 drew … 49.5 million viewers … George W. Bush’s first address before Congress, in Feb. 2001, reached an average audience of 39.8 million viewers. Online, a C-SPAN video of Mr. Obama’s address has been viewed more than 150,000 times on YouTube. The Republican response, delivered by Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, has been viewed more than 75,000 times.”

Presented by Starbucks -- Reality bites: Top earners get to make that sacrifice they bugged Bush for as the president makes a huge push to do health care

— Jindal is on “60 Minutes” on Sunday. Newt Gingrich tells Morley Safer the Louisiana governor “will automatically be a major contender for the presidency for many, many years. Remember, he'll be the same age as John McCain — 34 years from now.”

— PUP-DATE, from Sandra Sobieraj Westfall’s People cover interview with Mrs. Obama: “Mrs. Obama says she favors Portuguese water dogs, and the target date is April, after their spring break trip. ‘So Sasha says “April 1st.” I said, “April.” She says, “April 1st.” It’s like, APRIL!’ There’s also been some back and forth about possible dog names. ‘Frank was one of them. Moose was another,’ she says with a laugh and a roll of her eyes. ‘I’m like, no. Come on. Let’s work with the names a little bit.’”

**Starbucks opens “green” state of the art coffee roasting plant that has been awarded LEED® Silver certification by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).**

BUDGET SPEED READ:

— PAUL HARVEY “THE REST OF THE STORY” — WashPost A1, “In President's Budget Plan, Broad Agenda and a Few Gaps,” by Lori Montgomery: “[T]hough Obama told Congress on Tuesday that his budget team has "already identified $2 trillion in savings" to help tame record budget deficits, about half of those "savings" are actually tax increases, administration officials said. A big chunk of the rest of the savings comes from measuring Obama's plans against an unrealistic scenario in which the Iraq war continues to suck up $170 billion a year forever.”

— MEDICARE PREMIUM HIKE FOR TOP 5 percent: — ABC’s Jake Tapper: “To partially fund the Health Care Reserve Fund, another new source of revenue — or tax hike — the president will propose applying the same income standard for premiums for Medicare Part D (prescription drugs) that applies already to Medicare Part B (doctors' visits). … [R]ight now couples who make more than $170,000 a year already pay higher premiums for Medicare Part B. If the president's proposal goes through, they will also pay higher premiums for prescription drugs. This will impact the top five percent of Medicare recipients, the Obama White House anticipates, or about 1.5 million people, and will raise $8.1 billion over 10 years.”

— MORE MONEY FOR AFGHANISTAN, LESS FOR IRAQ — Bloomberg’s Tony Capaccio: The budget and a supplemental request “will seek $205.5 billion more for combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, including $75.5 billion through the end of this fiscal year, according to three people familiar with the request. … The proposal will also request $130 billion for the wars in fiscal 2010. … The amounts for the wars are less than Defense Secretary Robert Gates asked for and in keeping with expectations that the president plans a major reduction of the 142,000 U.S. soldiers now in Iraq. The extra funding … includes money for adding 17,000 personnel to the U.S. force of 38,000 in Afghanistan.”

— BUT TOTAL WAR COSTS RISING FOR NOW — ABC’s Luis Martinez: “Congress had already appropriated $65.9 billion for the first half of fiscal year 2009. [A] Defense official confirms that the second half of the fiscal year 2009 request will be for $75.5 billion … In a letter to Congress on Dec. 31, Defense Secretary Robert Gates estimated that this request might be $69.7 billion. That estimate did not take into account the addition of troops into Afghanistan.”

— YUCK TO YUCCA — AP’s H. Josef Hebert, “Obama is taking the first step toward blocking a nuclear waste dump at Nevada's Yucca Mountain by slashing money for the program in his first budget … Obama's budget to be announced Thursday will eliminate virtually all funding for the Yucca project with the exception of money needed for license applications submitted last year to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.”

EXCLUSIVE — FOX D.C. CHANGES: Playbook hears that Fox News Channel's Washington bureau is close to naming Bill Sammon vice president & managing editor and Fox veteran Bryan Boughton its bureau chief. Sammon, who joined Fox last year, replaces Brit Hume as managing editor, a title Hume held along with his anchor position until stepping down in 2008 for an analyst role with the network. D.C. sources say Sammon's role will focus on editorial matters and Boughton's will be nuts and bolts operational.

SEBELIUS VETTING — CBN’s David Brody: “A senior Obama administration official tells The Brody File that concerns voiced by pro-life groups about potential HHS Secretary nominee Kathleen Sebelius have come up in high-level White House discussions but it has not disqualified her from the job. Pro-life groups believe Sebelius’ connection to Kansas late-term abortionist George Tiller is a major problem.”

THE WARS — McClatchy Newspapers, “U.S. troops mount offensive in remote Afghan valley,” by Jonathan S. Landay: “JALREZ VALLEY, Afghanistan — Hundreds of U.S. troops pushed into a key Taliban stronghold Wednesday in a major operation to stop the insurgents from infiltrating the Afghan capital from the south and clear the way for the first sustained international aid effort in this remote valley.”

WHO’S WHO — Bloomberg’s Viola Gienger: Secretary “Clinton plans to tap a prominent activist to head the State Department bureau overseeing human rights issues. She intends to name Michael Posner, president of New York-based Human Rights First, as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor.”

BUSH ALUMNI, from releases:

— Sean I. McCormack will join Boeing in its Washington, D.C., Government Operations office as vice president, Communications. McCormack, 44, most recently was assistant secretary for public affairs at the U.S. State Department, reporting to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He was responsible for the State Department's global communications strategies, including media relations, state and local government relations, and digital media outreach. In addition, he served the department as chief spokesman. From 2001 to 2005, McCormack was deputy White House press secretary and National Security Council spokesman. In that role, he was responsible for National Security Council media relations and prepared Rice for her testimony before the 9-11 Commission when she was national security adviser.

— Honorable Carlos Gutiérrez, former secretary of commerce under the George W. Bush administration, has been named a nonresident scholar at the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies. Gutierrez will be based in Washington, D.C., and from there will help ICCAS’ Cuba Business Roundtable, an ongoing program that recruits businesses who are interested in information and professional advice on Cuba to be ready to do business in a post-embargo, post-Castro Cuba. He will also serve as keynote speaker in ICCAS’ Cuba Transition Project seminars in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Canada.

PANETTA MEETS THE PRESS — CIA Director Leon E. Panetta says the relationship between the intelligence agency and Congress has “had a lot of problems” under the last administration and “has to be repaired,” which he said is one of his top priorities. Panetta, a former House member and top White House official who was sworn in Feb. 13, told a media roundtable Wednesday that the “relationship was badly damaged” and that he hopes “to restore the trust between this agency and Capitol Hill.” Panetta made his comments at a meeting with two dozen reporters who were allowed into his conference room inside the agency’s heavily fortified headquarters compound, the George Bush Center for Intelligence in Langley, Va. Plates piled with big cookies were in the center of a massive conference table in a room a few doors from the director’s office.

The hall is lined with offices with secure doors opened with safe-like dials. Facing a portrait of President Obama on the opposite wall, Panetta said that under the Bush administration, there was at times “a deliberate effort to not develop firm ground rules” about congressional notification “in order to be able to do this in a haphazard manner depending on what the issues were.” Panetta said that on some sensitive matters, the top congressional leaders (the “gang of four,” in Hill parlance) were notified by the Bush administration, while other times the intelligence committees were included (the “gang of eight”). “One of the things I’d like to do, frankly, is set some ground rules as to when we do notify the Congress and who we do have to notify,” he said. “Do we notify the gang of eight; do we notify all of the members plus their staffs … so that we all know the rules that we’re operating by.”

At his confirmation hearing, Panetta vowed “a clean break” from some controversial Bush-era polices. He told the reporters: “If we stand by our ideals, if we stand by the beliefs that we have about what this country is all about, I think it makes us stronger, not only here but throughout the world.” For one thing, he said, “We are closing black sites,” a reference to secret prisons abroad used to hold and question suspected terrorist combatants. The phrase “war on terror,” a hallmark of President George W. Bush’s White House, is rarely used in the Obama administration, but Panetta said that “there’s no question this is a war.”

ALSO: “We’re closing black sites.”

HAPPENING TODAY, from release: AFL-CIO and Change to Win File IRS Complaint Against The Marcus Foundation and Center for Union Facts: The AFL-CIO and Change to Win are filing a joint complaint with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) against Rick Berman’s Center for Union Facts and Bernie Marcus’ the Marcus Foundation for violating their “charitable” tax status by engaging in partisan political activity on behalf of Republican Senate candidates during the 2008 election.

TALKER, from The (Park City, Utah) Record: “Somebody stole between 15 and 20 pieces of jewelry from Mitt Romney's Park City mansion, the police department said, describing that the person who took the jewelry appears to have had access to the house. Rick Ryan, a police department captain, said the jewelry belongs to Romney's wife, Ann Romney. … [T]he jewelry has a ‘high value.’ … [T]here was not evidence that somebody broke into the house. … [W]orkers had been in the house sometime between Jan. 5 and Feb. 16 to work on a shower … a bathroom next door to the walk-in closet where the jewelry was taken … The jewelry was in a box on a shelf in the closet, he said. … Police investigators have asked Ann Romney's jewelry consultant for a list of pieces that might have been taken.”

MEDIAWATCH, from POLITICO’s Michael Calderone: “Reader's Digest D.C. bureau chief Carl Cannon notified friends and colleagues that the magazine was closing its office in the capital … Cannon, who's also a National Journal contributing editor, wrote that ‘as a casualty of this recession you’ve been hearing our president talk about, Reader’s Digest has closed its D.C. bureau.’ He'll continue writing the ‘Loose Cannon’ column on the RD.com.”

SPORTS BLINK — WashPost A1, “Capitals Lead Washington Into New Ice Age,” by Dan Steinberg: “Washington's once-dormant hockey team is enjoying a surge of interest that rivals anything the franchise has experienced in its 35 years. Tonight, the Capitals will tie a nearly 20-year-old franchise record with their 10th consecutive sellout. … When 2009-10 season tickets went on sale last week, the ticket staff — which has doubled in size over the past year — sold 1,000 new plans in a day and 2,000 in a week, despite a modest increase in ticket prices and gloomy economic forecasts. Team officials said they could deplete their ticket inventory before next season begins. Those numbers have translated into a raucous environment downtown at Verizon Center, where visiting coaches say they have trouble communicating with players because of the clamor and audio engineers have been forced to adjust the ambient noise levels in their broadcasts. National media outlets routinely mocked the Capitals' attendance as recently as two years ago; now, they're comparing the District's fans to those from traditional hockey hotbeds like Montreal and Philadelphia.”

Sports Illustrated cover: “THE RETURN OF TIGER … Lance Rides Again.”

DESSERT – AP, “Nick Mitchell has ‘American Idol’ judges laughing,” by AP Television Writer Frazie Moore: “Hopeful Nick Mitchell … left the judges laughing and nearly speechless Wednesday after he wailed a show-stopper from the musical ‘Dreamgirls.’ He came on as the flamboyant alter ego he has christened Norman Gentle. Simon Cowell called the performance ‘atrocious’ and ‘horrific,’ and his three fellow judges didn't argue. … Red-haired, full-throated Allison Iraheta wowed the judges. … On Wednesday's live broadcast, the second group of 12 contestants were vying to be among this season's dozen finalists. The night's top three vote-getters will be revealed on the Fox series' Thursday episode.”

**Starbucks’ new South Carolina facility has been awarded LEED® Silver certification for New Construction by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). The company invested in a variety of green design elements to help reduce the energy and waste generated by both the construction and operation of the facility.

Using green design components certified by a third-party organization is part of Starbucks strategy to help achieve the Starbucks™ Shared Planet™ goal to significantly reduce its environmental footprint by 2015. **

Jeez, they're just a little late. For years, while both the democrats and the republicans represented two sides of the same coin, the 'government-by-bribery, screw-the-people' approach, the nation sorely needed a third party, one that would restore our country to our people. Now that the Democratic Party under Obama, with the disastrous past administration of The Dummy and his NeoConZionist Puppeteers as a spur, has aspired to the role of the government becoming, once again, 'of,by, and for the people', a group is forming a third party. But not a party of reform. No, they are forming a party of 'Stay the Course', wanting to keep the most malicious, mendacious, malevolent miscreants in power, under the mantra 'Greed is Great'. What is this new party? A look at the forming members will give you a clue. Jindal, Limbaugh, DeLay, Boner, Palin, Gingrich. Their war cry? 'Stupid dirty greedy bas*ards need representation, too'. And their party's name? They are resurrecting the hallowed name, they are becoming the new 'Know Nothings', from centuries ago. How apropos.